Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (51 page)

To replace the Feuillant executive arm, a new executive of six ministers—of the interior, war, public finances, justice, naval affairs, and foreign affairs—would be elected by the legislature. Voting began immediately. For the first time ever, every minister, commencing with the interior minister, was chosen by the Assembly alone. Each deputy named two candidates (in a loud voice), after which a list was compiled recording how many votes each candidate had received. Then, knowing how much support each candidate had, every deputy would name one on the agreed list for each ministry. Roland triumphantly secured the interior ministry, Danton justice, Clavière finances, Servan army administration, Lebrun foreign affairs, and the mathematician and academician Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) naval affairs. One of the world’s chief experts on cannon design as well as geometry, Monge was put forward on Condorcet’s recommendation.
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Pierre Lebrun-Tondu (1754–93), also an eminent mathematician close to Brissot, Carra, and Roland, was yet another prominent editor and intellectual gracing the revolutionary leadership. Prominent in the Liège Revolution of 1787, he had been a leader of the Belgian Revolution’s democratic fringe. Danton joined the executive with Brissot’s support, the latter hoping in this way to render his then still friendly relations with him a feature of the new power structure.
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Predictably, not a single Robespierriste or, apart from Danton, populist candidate, was chosen for any ministry or for the Assembly’s new steering group. Several sections, including Quatre-Nations, Luxembourg, Arsenal, and Faubourg-Montmartre, asked Pétion to stay on as Paris mayor. But he resigned, preferring to stand for election to the forthcoming Convention and join Brissot’s steering committee, in effect becoming part of France’s new democratic government.

Even more remarkable than the efficiency and incisiveness of the rising in the capital was the 10 August revolution’s swift success in securing concurrence in the country. Lafayette’s efforts over the next few days to mobilize forces under his command in the north and bring the Ardennes department over to the king failed dismally,
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as did his
ally Baron Philippe Frédéric Dietrich’s attempt to raise Strasbourg. At Marseille, where the mayor, Mourraille, patron of Barbaroux, favored a radical course, the republicans at once won the backing of the section assemblies; Feuillant opponents found themselves arrested. At Avignon too, republican and pro-Jacobin sentiment easily triumphed. The electoral assembly there, meeting on 2 September, chose as their Convention deputies Barbaroux, Omer, Granet, and Bayle, all strongly committed republicans set on ending the monarchy.
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Town governments that resisted were rapidly replaced. On 22 August, a column of radical Marseillais marched on the departmental capital at Aix-en-Provence, ransacked the city hall, and arrested many administrative officers and staff, along with other suspects, transferring the departmental administration to Marseille, which now dominated the Revolution throughout Provence.
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What explains the astonishing solidarity of the August 1792 revolution? By this point, both Feuillants and modérantisme were widely discredited. It was not just the usurpations of particular individuals, many realized through reading and debates, that accounted for France’s ills. The moderate constitutionalist structure was illogical, unworkable, and urgently needed changing. Intellectually, observed Lanthenas, the most aware had fully grasped beforehand the need to break the monarchical and modérantiste grip. A key feature of the 10 August rising, he noted, was that practically no one of any reading, judgment, and discernment was any longer willing to support the Crown, aristocracy, and clergy.
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Meanwhile, Robespierre stayed altogether out of the picture until it was all over, authoritarian populism not yet strong enough to challenge the mix of Brissotins and Left populists who had engineered the insurrection. The French Republic came about suddenly, in a moment, on a basis of surprising consensus without significant resistance in the Assembly, thanks less to the deputies, or indeed, as Prudhomme emphasized, the people, than a band of “courageous writers who had fearlessly proclaimed and developed republican principles” beforehand.
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It is therefore altogether untrue, as has often been maintained, that on 10 August the people “went further than the Assembly” and “forced its hand.”
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On the contrary, the people played only a passive part: the Assembly’s democratic republican wing, concerting with the leadership of certain Paris sections, planned, organized, and engineered a “popular” rising that took charge and consolidated its grip over the Revolution, while the vast majority looked on mostly inactively and uncomprehendingly.

Consolidating the Democratic Revolution

Embracing democracy and freedom of expression and to petition, the legislature, at the urging of the Assembly’s committee of public welfare (
secours publics
), also declared for a more interventionist social conscience than in the past. The numbers of poor, it was acknowledged, had considerably increased due to the departure of so many noble émigrés. The nation’s responsibility was to ensure a tenable balance between the needs and means of the destitute. Declaring the “poor man’s right to public assistance” a guiding principle of democracy and the Revolution, the Assembly began by authorizing a national subsidy for civic hospitals. Hospitals were required to submit certified lists of the revenues they had possessed in 1789 and subsequent losses to their incomes through confiscation of ecclesiastical endowments and benefices.
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Plans were drawn up for the treasury to transfer a bloc grant to the interior ministry intended to cover the cost of all the hospitals over the next year.

Louis and his family, now truly prisoners, were transferred from the Tuileries on 13 August, not to the sedate Luxembourg, as Brissot proposed, but—at Commune insistence—to the dour Temple instead. On the way, records Gorsas, the royal carriage stopped to view the shattered fragments of the famous seventeen-meter-high equestrian statue of Louis XIV sculpted by François Girardon, inaugurated in 1699 and dominating the Place Vendôme (until now called the Place Louis-le-Grand). The monument had been overthrown and shattered by the crowds on 10 August, and the Commune was considering replacing its pitiable fragments with a pyramid, commemorating the citizens who died in the attack on the Tuileries.
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Everywhere, the monarchy’s end was reflected in the Revolution’s changed symbolism. Over the next few days, mountains of statues, busts, portraits, coats of arms, emblems, and inscriptions glorifying monarchs, grandees, courtiers, aristocrats, and cardinals disappeared from sight across France.
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The names of royal towns, gardens, and palaces at Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain, Saint-Denis, and Choisy-le-Roi were all changed, while the capital’s great aristocratic palaces became the headquarters of revolutionary committees and sociétés populaires. Versailles became virtually depopulated within months, its famous gardens sadly degenerating into wretched ruins.

Relentless street-name changing spread to all France’s cities, countless local designations redolent of royalty and aristocracy being effaced. No Paris section any longer retained the words “king” or “royal” in its name. On 13 August, section Louis-le-Grand changed its name to Mail; on 21
August, Roi-de-Sicile became Droits-de-l’Homme.
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The Rue d’Artois, named (since 1770) after the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, one of the émigré leaders striving to topple the Revolution, became the Rue de Cérutti after the philosophe-révolutionnaire who died the previous February. The section Henri IV was renamed Pont Neuf. Although the “virtues” of Henri IV had previously kept the well-known statue of that monarch beside the bridge in place, it was now removed; in its place was installed a pedestal with tablets proclaiming the Rights of Man.
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On 17 January 1793, the Paris Commune even ruled that the medieval stone kings adorning the facade of Notre Dame cathedral, and the medallion portrait of Louis XV in the cathedral curate’s courtyard with its “blasphemous” inscription “Pietas augusta,” should be removed, along with the marble statue of Louis XIV in the Academy of Surgery. All these, the city works department was directed, in consultation with the “commission des arts,” were to be stored away unseen.
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After the initial euphoria came swift disappointment. The revolutionaries failed to stabilize and consolidate the democratic revolution that now ensued, chiefly because two rival and quite distinct entities—the Brissotin-dominated Assembly and the populist Paris Commune, where Robespierre’s men now largely displaced the previous Pétion circle—presented themselves as the authentic voice of the 10 August insurrection. Those who most forcefully appropriated the title of being the true authors of the rising were the factions of Marat and Robespierre, even though, as Pétion expressed it, “the men who attribute to themselves the glory of this
journée
are those to whom it belongs the least.”
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The people, disorientated and divided enough already, found themselves confronted with two strenuously competing accounts of the insurrection and conflicting claims as to what constituted its criteria of legitimacy. The legislature, despite a long speech by Mandar on 17 August eulogizing popular insurrection as the basis of democratic principles, not unnaturally preferred to play down the role of insurgency, emphasizing rather the centrality of constitutional principle.
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According to the now Brissotin-dominated Assembly, only the future democratically elected new Convention would possess the authority to formalize Louis’s dethronement, decide whether to try him for treason, and end the monarchy. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the now Montagnard-dominated Paris Commune, by contrast, preferred to proceed without more ado to dethrone Louis, sentence him to death for treason—deeming him to have been judged by the people on 10 August—and reorganize the country.
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Canvassing and campaigning in the primary and electoral assemblies for the National Convention proceeded throughout late August and early September. In the Théâtre-Français section, the former “citoyens passifs” in theory increased those entitled to vote from 2,617 to 4,294 adult males. But, as before, only a few—under 10 percent—actually attended meetings and voted.
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These being the first elections in history ever carried out on a universal suffrage basis, the Left republican press went all out to convince the electorate of their special importance, how much the future would be shaped by them, and, as Louvet’s
La Sentinelle
stressed, the need for deputies of proven talents and enlightened attitudes to be elected. However, the poorest citizenry were not just urged to vote: in Paris especially they were shepherded a particular way, in favor of the Montagne, with citizens known for Brissotin, as well as “moderate” or royalist sympathies, being firmly discouraged from voting. Those illiterates and barely literate who voted did so rigorously ushered and canvassed by section bosses—in Théâtre-Français, especially the affluent printer Momoro—who were hardly humble men themselves. The outcome was not healthy democratic debate and still less class solidarity but assiduously managed ideological consensus. From August 1792 onward, both the Cordeliers and Jacobins functioned more as ideological vetting machines than debating clubs.

In preparing the elections for the National Convention, Brissotins stressed the, to them, overriding importance of filling the legislature with distinguished men of outstanding talent and revolutionary principle. In this connection, on 24 August, the Assembly adopted the proposal of a delegation led by Marie-Joseph Chénier, with Condorcet’s support, urging that France’s pending National Convention should be the “congress of the entire world” with regard to the great principles of human happiness and democracy. To promote this ideal, the Assembly should offer honorary citizenship and the right to participate in the Republic’s politics and debates to all of humanity’s most eminent “apostles of liberty” and foreign benefactors. Since France’s Convention was about to forge the world’s first democratic constitution based on the Rights of Man, everyone who had helped advance “la raison humaine et préparé les voies de la liberté” in the world, should be recruited as public “allies” of democratic France in her struggle against kings, nobles, and “superstition.” Just as the Roman Empire enlisted vassal “kings” as allies, the Republic must adopt all the “philosophes courageux” known for combating tyranny and bigotry and declare these “benefactors of humanity” prized honorary citizens. Particularly honored should be
writers whose texts had materially assisted the American and French Revolutions.
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Among those proposed by Chénier were Paine, “the immortal author” of
Common Sense
and the
Rights of Man
, Madison of the
Federalist
, and Joseph Priestley, whose victimization at the hands of the Birmingham “King and Church” mob had “covered him with glory,” along with Wilberforce, Robertson, Makintosh (for refuting Burke), and the Dutchman Willem Bolts (1735–1808), author of the
Histoire philosophique et politique de Bengale
,
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“persecuted” by the English East India Company for claiming India’s poor and exploited “were not destined by nature to groan eternally under the yoke of oppression.”
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Other nominees were the Milanese radical Gorani, “illustrious through the persecution and hatred” of the Austrian Hapsburgs, inveterate foes of the “bonheur des hommes”; the Swiss school reformer Pestalozzi; and another Dutchman (and uncle of Cloots), Cornelis de Pauw, “flail of all prejudices in his writings on Greeks, Chinese and [Native] Americans.” Germany, bent under “the triple yoke” of monarchical, military, and “feudal” tyranny, should be honored through those “esprits généreux” who had achieved self-emancipation despite public servitude, though only one such writer was initially named—Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818). A leading school reformer who had visited Paris in August 1789, together with his later famous pupil, the Aufklärer Wilhelm von Humboldt, to witness the Revolution’s initial stages, Campe edited the former
Braunschweigisches Journal
, now transferred (under Prussian pressure) to Danish Altona and renamed the
Schleswigsches Journal
.
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Denouncing the principle of aristocracy and severely criticizing Montesquieu, Campe and his circle defended “French liberty” and the Rights of Man, propagating in Germany the “immortal principles that will break the chains of all the peoples of the world.” For leading Polish opposition to the tyrannical empress Catherine “on the banks of the Vistula,” General Malakowski was proposed. By such means could “fraternité universelle,” the aim of philosophers and purpose of the social order, be realized.
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